We Have Signal: Live From Birmingham

We Have Signal: Live From Birmingham, Alabama Public Television (http://www.aptv.org/WHS/index.asp)

Are you a fan of Bill Frisell, The Dirtbombs, The Dodos, or Cordero? Do you have your ear to the ground for the latest rockabilly, garage, indie, punk, Seattle grunge, or new wave sound? Do you like to keep your fingers on the pulse of the next big beat? If you answered “yes” to any of the above, you may want to bookmark Alabama Public Television’s We Have Signal: Live from Birmingham website. This Website features 30-minute videos that are recorded live for the show at the BottleTree Café in Birmingham. The venue creates a genuine intimacy between audience and performers that is a thing of beauty and a thing next best to being there. The show is hot. It is admired by critics. It won a regional Emmy Award and three bronze Telly Awards. The program’s mission is to feature new and innovative bands. But please be wary, you might start watching clips at 10:00 p.m. and still be watching them at 3:00 a.m. Bands that have not yet made it big—bands that have not sold out and do not want to sell out—make some of the most exciting contributions to culture today. Small independent bands often reflect regional sensibilities and opinions that are unconstrained by commercial influences. They offer a respite from a world where mass culture seems to pervade almost every aspect of human experience. The songs of the high-energy double-drum Detroit garage band “The Dirtbombs” for example, resonate strongly with the experience of living in a city in decline. Dirtbombs founder Mick Collins describes Detroit as a “company town where the company has left,” observing that “the city falls further into decrepitude every day.” Detroit, says Collins, is a place that is quiet, but it’s quiet because everybody left. The Dirtbombs, on the other hand, are not quiet. And they’re into it. Check them, and a lot of other great acts, at http://www.aptv.org/WHS/index.asp . It will do you no harm.

Buck Berry

Poetry Criticism

Poetry Criticism: Gale Research Inc., 1991 to 2009

The nearly 100 volumes of Poetry Criticism are an indispensable resource for poets, English majors, or anyone else who has an interest in understanding poetry. One can turn to this impressive source to quickly locate criticism on various poets and poems. If one were interested in investigating on the criticism of a certain poet, she would only have to turn to the Cumulative Index in the back of the most recent volume. There one can look up the poet they are interested in to discover which volume or volumes contains the criticism. Poetry Criticism also includes an Annual Cumulative Title Index. Within its bindings is the list of all of the poems discussed within Poetry Criticism’s 98 volumes. Poetry Criticism is a unique and straightforward resource, useful for anyone interested in analyzing poetry.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.  Michael Pollan.   New York: Penguin, 2006.

Read this book, and you may never look at food in quite the same way again.  Michael Pollan has looked very closely at our food, and sees extensive health, environmental, and ethical implications in our food-production system, and in our food choices.

Journalist Pollan has followed 4 meals from their origins to the plate.  He addresses questions of food politics and food economics, and in tracking the origins of a fast-food meal, he documents the alarming extent to which our food consists of highly-processed corn  grown in monocultures disastrous to the natural world and to our health, and fed to us as well as to the animals we eat.

The results of this food system are the packaged products full of mysterious and unpronounceable ingredients cramming grocery stores, as well as the burgers, fries and sodas churned out by fast-food outlets. The notion of “corn-fed beef” sounds so terribly wholesome… until Pollan explains that cows are built to eat grass, and don’t readily digest corn.  And check that bottle of “green tea” you pick up because it sounds all healthy and natural… it might be full of high fructose corn syrup, a highly-processed corn sweetener long on calories and short on nutrition.

We do, however, have other options, as Pollan makes clear.  Farmers markets are springing up everywhere, making it possible to buy locally-grown produce and even eggs and meat, and to know where at least some of our own food is coming from.    Organic foods are increasingly visible in supermarkets, but there are caveats to consider.   Supermarkets  clearly get the attractiveness of labels like ‘organic’ and ‘natural’, but the variety of claims made on foods can be mind-boggling:  eggs alone might claim to be ‘cage-free’, ‘high in omega-3’, ‘organic’, and/or ‘from vegetarian-diet hens’, etc., all of which can mean different things, or not really mean much.   Buy eggs at your local farm stand or farmer’s market, and you at least know where they came from.

Michael Pollan wants us to change the way we eat – for environmental, economic, moral, and health reasons, but also for lasting pleasure.  “How and what we eat,” he says, “determines to a great extent the use we make of the world – and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. … In the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasure that are only deepened by knowing.” (p.11).

-Bonnie Figgatt

Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam

Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam.  Gordon M. Goldstein.  New York: Times Books, 2008.

With questions pressing about American involvement in Afghanistan, the Vietnam-war decision making chronicled in Lessons in Disaster has become a hot topic.  The book’s author, Gordon M. Goldstein, wrote one of two op-ed pieces on Vietnam-Afghanistan parallels in the October 18, 2009 New York Times, laying out “lessons” that he considers “relevant to Afghanistan today”.

As national security adviser to presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1965, McGeorge Bundy was a major player in presidential decisions about American involvement in Vietnam.    Goldstein’s history of these crucial decision points and Bundy’s involvement in them revisits the path to war in Vietnam, a path that has been compared to current United States involvement in Afghanistan.

Indeed, New York Times columnist Frank Rich unearthed the news that Lessons in Disaster has recently been a much-read title among President Barack Obama’s advisers, as the President grapples with decisions about American strategy in Afghanistan.  Rich compares the current situation with early decisions made by President Kennedy about Vietnam, and analyzes the parallels in his Sept. 27, 2009 piece, “Obama at the Precipice”.

Rich further points out that Lessons in Disaster was reviewed last year by Richard Holbrooke in the New York Times Book Review.  Holbrooke, currently the Obama administration’s special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, called the book “an extraordinary cautionary tale for all Americans”.

Bonnie Figgatt